Ramana Maharshi...on tape

[Elias]

I'm watching the 73 minute Ramana tape that Jim sent me. It is extraordinary. Among the facts I learned was that there already existed a great complex of temples around Arunachala when Ramana arrived, as a boy. I learned that he spent most of his early years in these temples, immersed in divine absorption. The "caves" on Arunachala were actually little temples built onto the front of caves. Ramana was not the first to stay in these "caves".

As a boy, he seems to have been stunned into silence by his opening to God. I mean to say, his mind was permanently silenced. Nice work if you can get it, hey?

Ramana's mother came to take care of him after her other son had died. When she was dying, he spent days with one hand on her heart and the other hand on her head, so as to guide her through the "worlds" into realization. He continued to keep his hands in this position for quite a while after she died. When asked why, he said that he had made a mistake with an old swami whose dying he had assisted -- he had removed his hands just before the man died, and the "the swami left his body through the eyes" rather than via the heart/sahasrar connection. (Note: Ramanashram was built on the mahasamadhi site of R.'s mother.)

I was astonished to hear how R. laid hands on his mother -- when my brother-in-law was dying, I held him a long time with my right hand on his heart and my left hand on the top of his head. I had never heard or read of anyone doing that -- it just seemed the natural thing to do, to intensify my own connection to him and his connection to whatever I could bring him. He died the next day, in his wife's arms, and as I learned later, he found his way out of the body directly to God, bypassing "the worlds". I have seen quite a few people die, but this was the first time I witnessed a man go unimpeded to divine realization.

The confirmation of this fact is alluded to in the thread below this one. In a night vision a few weeks later, I found him unembodied, merged with God. Usually, when someone dies, you will find them embodied in a world of some kind -- either a spiritual loka, or a replica of this world, or perhaps even a hell of some kind. But my friend apparently was "ripe" to bypass all of that.

"How do you like it?" I asked him. "IT'S GREAT!" he said, and his voice seemed to echo across the universe. In that moment I felt exactly what he was experiencing, and it was almost overwhelming, to the point where I started to die and leave my body. I had to force myself not to follow him.)

People who speak, rather simplistically, of "the divine", or "God realization", or "non-dual realization", etc usually have no idea of the vast reality they hope to encompass in their meager words. It is simply indescribable and all-consuming. It wipes out this bodily reality and all the "needs" of this reality. And there are as many kinds of direct experience of God as there are snowflakes -- literally, "the ten billion names of God". No orthodoxy can hold it, or lay claim to it, or invent some kind of discrimination to keep out the unclean and the non-priestly classes...

Thus, in watching the film of Ramana, I could see Ramana as one kind of window into God -- not the final revelation of the Absolute, as some claim of him. His realization is genuine, and taking his darshan via this tape can floor you. You will feel the top of the brain going wild at the sight of him.

But then, afterwards, you are restored to your duty, to your own unraveling, and to your mission to get together a kick-ass blues band to save the convent...

later

Elias

[Elias]

One of the interesting things in the Ramana movie is the story of how he enlightened a cow.

They show the cow, a rather docile creature, white with sorrowful eyes. It was Ramana's favorite. He made quite a deal about how he raised it to Self Realization. After the cow died, Ramana built a shrine to it.

If you are a true believer, you can probably take this in without any salt. For myself, it had the effect of making me see Ramana as strangely flawed, in an innocent and primitive way.

In fact, the film offers a new dimension on the sage that you don't get from just reading the books. I understand now what Jung meant when he said Ramana was "a true son of the Indian earth."

I know a cow can't be enlightened. But in India, the most fantastic things are possible, and even the Jnanis embrace & believe the superstitions and the myths of the collective.

How is this possible? If you have taken a "night-sea journey" into the psyche, you know how it is possible -- the psyche, in all its symbolic and magical aspects is like a coat of many colors thrown over the nakedness of the Self. It is within the humor of the Self, as realized in the East, to accept and embrace the dream-like universe of the psyche.

In the West, largely because of the rise of rationalism and science, the Self will appear (when it finally does) unadorned, brutally honest, and not so passive before the archetypes and the wishful fantasies of the masses... (Which is one reason Buddhism has caught on here, far more than Hinduism. And one reason Daism will never catch on.)

Wow, this is a big subject. More later, perhaps.

~E

[Elias]

Still feeling the effects of the Ramana film... more about this in the "An Incidence of Dying" thread, below...